Raquel Garbers: Carney will squander Canada’s middle power advantage by allying with China

In his spring 2026 address at Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney told world leaders that the post-Cold War order had collapsed, leaving states across the globe scrambling to defend their interests in a more dangerous world.

His advice was simple. Middle powers, he said, should band together to defend themselves against the great powers and build a new global order. Left unsaid at Davos and in the speeches that followed was the inconvenient truth that maximizing middle power influence instead demands staying anchored inside the U.S. orbit.

A key Pentagon official has now put voice to this reality. In a series of July 14 posts on X, U.S. Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby said the idea of a middle-powers coalition is “based on a faulty understanding of international relations” and that these countries “don’t have a coherent basis for alignment.”

Colby is correct. The messy truth is that middle powers have little influence absent great power patronage. They face economic and military exposure to the great powers, bespoke (if not conflicting) national interests, geographic distance from one another and vulnerability to great power punishments. This means that few will succeed at insulating themselves from great power politics.

The fantasy future where middle powers call their own shots is rooted in the failure to understand that the outsized influence they wielded in the last global order was not the natural state of international affairs. It was the result of their privileged place inside the U.S. orbit at a highly unique moment in history. As one of two superpowers at the end of the Second World War and soon enough basking in overwhelming power at the end of the Cold War, the United States championed a new form of global hegemony — an international rules-based order that mediated tensions between states and sheltered lesser powers by constraining stronger ones. It was that order — and the American hegemony that underpinned it — that allowed middle powers to exercise more influence than their objective power warranted.

The world has now changed, with hostile states on the rise and the United States laser-focused on holding them in check. The rules-based order is collapsing on cue, taking down with it the middle powers’ golden era.

Having failed to understand that the rules-based order was a passing historical moment, the middle powers made fateful errors when they allowed their militaries to atrophy and ensnared themselves in Beijing’s economic traps. The truth they must now face is that they are wholly unprepared for the return of politics as usual.

The middle powers are now deeply dependent on the United States to protect them, and the imperative of keeping the U.S. onside requires that their national strategies rest on three key pillars: not being burdens, making themselves useful and not playing footsie with America’s adversaries. This same strategic logic applies to their bilateral relations: each must calibrate its relationships with the others in ways that first and foremost protect its relationship with the U.S.

With power politics back in play, the middle powers’ best strategic play is to maximize their influence and protect against U.S. overreach by joining forces in coalitions of the capable. These coalitions’ must-do lists are short and sharp: advance the strategic objectives they share with the United States, build the military capabilities they need at the alliance level and lessen their vulnerability to adversaries — in particular, China and Russia.

Ensuring that the coalitions succeed where yesterday’s multilateralism failed starts with casting off mindsets that privilege luxury preoccupations over concrete impacts. The coalitions must be flexible in their membership, focused in their mission, fast in their execution and fierce in their power. This is not to suggest that there is no place for values in coalitions of the capable. Values distinguish the allies from the adversaries, and the greatest value of all ought to be defending the allies’ way of life against hostile authoritarian states.

In Canada’s case, the prime minister seems to understand much of the strategic logic behind the need for coalitions of the capable. Chief among the tells is his commitment to building military capabilities (don’t be a burden) and his post-Davos declaration that Canada’s diversification efforts in trade and defence will “help make America great again” (do be useful).

Given Canada’s new strategic partnership with China, it is much less clear whether it will act on the third pillar of the strategic logic: don’t be a liability by playing footsie with adversaries. Insofar as that partnership has already damaged Canada by giving the U.S. reason to take a harsher stance in bilateral trade negotiations, striking a coalition of the capable focused on arresting Beijing’s decades-long economic attacks on the West would seem like a good place to start.

Should Canada instead deepen its ties with China, the consequences will be sharp and highly predictable. Canada will be exposed to worsening aggression by Beijing, abandoned by allies that understand they must prioritize relations with the U.S. and subjected to American actions to counter the threat north of their border.

In the world as it actually is, Canada must back away from its entanglements with Beijing to keep its allies onside and secure its sovereignty inside the U.S. orbit.

National Post

Raquel Garbers is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. She is a former senior official at the Department of National Defence.